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Hello, readers and friends! I’m here this week taking a look at Commander. I’m a huge fan of Mono-Green Tron in Pauper and decided that I wanted to try and win with Eldrazi, but instead of slapping together some Eldrazi ramp deck I wanted to do it in a particularly unfair way. This led me to Bant PolyOath! Let’s go ahead and take a look at the list, and we’ll break it down:

This is the deck’s namesake right here. Ideally, we want to use Oath of Druids or Polymorph to cheat out one of our high costed creatures early and take over the game. There is a bit of tension here from a deck construction standpoint. Both strategies encourage you to play zero creatures other than your bombs, but whereas Polymorph wants there to be creature(s) on your side of the battlefield, Oath of Druids does not. We try to maintain that balance by playing some amount of token production, but not an abundance. The tokens are also fine for chump blocking to buy us time if needed. We play Derevi as our Commander because (s)he can give us a blocker when needed, a creature to Polymorph when needed, and never becomes more expensive that four mana all at instant speed. Derevi is merely a tool to help the greater scheme here and is otherwise pretty unimportant to the overall theme of the deck.

We play a couple of ramp spells that fetch lands or color fix, but we also wanted some number of colorless producing lands/mana rocks. There will be some games where we draw our bombs and just cast them naturally. When that happens, we need to be sure that we have the right colors/type of mana to do that, these are integral to make Kozilek, the Great Distortion work.

I’m a huge fan of tutors in Commander, but especially when our deck is trying to assemble a specific combo such as this one. We play some tutors that find enchantments and some that find spells. Which one you draw first will often carve out your game plan for the next significant amount of time. Polymorph and Oath of Druids will generally have the same outcome: a powerful creature on the board, but each one asks for you to jump through different hoops.

These are your alternate win conditions. Storm Herd is exclusively a win con; the other two are not. Karn Liberated and Elspeth, Sun’s Champion are both in the deck because of their utility but can take over a game in the right situation. Relying too hard on Planeswalkers in a multiplayer format can be very risky though, so be wary. Protecting your ally from three opponents is much different than one.

The deck plays a fair amount of sweepers. Considering we’re often time functioning with an empty board while assembling our combo we need a way to slow down our opponents en masse. Wiping the board is usually a strong way to do that.

Relying entirely on sweepers is a gambling man’s game, so we also want some mixture of targeted removal and counterspells. The counterspells obviously have the ability to function as a means to protect our Polymorphed creatures as well as disrupt our opponent. The last thing we want is to work to get a Consecrated Sphinx onto the table and let it die before it ever draws us a card.

Alright, guys, that’s it! The deck is pretty simple when it comes down to it. I thought this was a fun and unusual take on Bant, I hope you guys liked it! I have a habit of making some incredibly expensive lists when I tackle Commander, so next time we visit the format, I’ll be doing a budget list. Stay tuned to Boggsimus Games!